How to use Sprout Social Reports to find your best times to post

This article will help you find out when your audience is most active and engaged by using Sprout Social's Profile Performance Report and Post Performance Report. Leveraging these data-driven insights can help you strategically schedule your content, validate the recommendations of Sprout's Optimal Send Times, and ultimately, boost your social media performance.

How to understand your audience's activity using available reports

Analyzing peak engagement days and post times in your Sprout reports will help to identify successful recipes based on your goals – whether that’s more exposure, increasing followers, or receiving more engagement.

Key metrics to analyze: 

• Audience growth
• Impressions
• Engagement
• Engagement rate
• Content Type

You can use the Profile Performance Report in Sprout to analyze the days in which you typically receive the most impressions and audience growth. This indicates when your audience is most active and likely to see your content. 

The Post Performance Report is a great tool to identify the content types that perform best across your various profiles and networks. You can sort your posts by post types, and various engagement metrics like reactions, comments, shares, and clicks to identify your top-performing content.

Formulate a hypothesis by aggregating historical content and grouping post times and content type. From there you can drill into content lifetime performance to benchmark user response to specific types of media and/or combination in order of publishing.

How to validate Optimal Send Times with your data

You can cross reference findings by comparing patterns from your reports with the suggested Optimal Send Times within Compose. From there, you can test and iterate with publishing at a variety of times to validate alignment between Optimal Send Times and your own analysis. Be sure to keep content type in mind with your testing! The type of content can be a key driver for audience engagement.

FAQs

Can I see an overview of when my audience is the most active?

While there's no dedicated report that shows data or visual interpretation of when your audience is most active and engaged, you can cross reference your Profile Performance and Post Performance reports to identify trends and patterns of best times and content to use to ensure optimal performance.

Where can I find out when my audience is most active?

You can use the Profile Performance Report in Sprout Social to analyze the days in which you typically receive the most impressions and audience growth. This indicates when your audience is most active and likely to see your content.

How do I know which posts are my most successful?

The Post Performance Report is the best tool for this. You can sort your posts by various engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and clicks to identify your top-performing content.

What is Optimal Send Times and how does it work?

Optimal Send Times is a feature in Sprout Social that recommends the best times to publish your content. It analyzes your audience's past engagement data, such as likes, comments, and private messages, to predict when they are most likely to interact with your posts.

Should I trust Optimal Send Times completely?

Optimal Send Times is a powerful, data-driven feature. However, for the most comprehensive strategy, we recommend using it in conjunction with your own analysis of the Profile and Post Performance Reports. This allows you to validate the recommendations and uncover additional insights specific to your content strategy.

How can I use the Post Performance Report to decide when to post?

In the Post Performance Report, sort your content by "Engagements." Look at the publication dates and times of your most engaging posts to find patterns. If your top posts were all published on weekday afternoons, for example, that's a strong indicator of a good time to post for your audience.

What's the difference between the Profile Performance and Post Performance reports for finding my best posting times?

The Profile Performance Report gives you a broad overview of when your audience is active and your content is being seen (impressions). The Post Performance Report provides specific details on which individual posts received the most engagement and when they were published. Use both for a complete picture.

Are there any other resources available for determining the best times to post on various social networks? 

Yes. You can check out our Sprout Insights Blog, “Best Times to Post on Social Media” article for broad, data-based recommendations across different networks.